Spinning the Wheel - The Coconut Chronicles: Two Guys, One Caribbean Dream House - page 48

The silence that followed was so complete I could hear the elevator in our building go-
ing up and down, a sound I rarely, if ever, noticed.
The phone rang. We ignored it.
“I think we should make an offer,” Michael concluded listlessly.
Duh.
☼ ☼ ☼
You'll be surprised to learn that making an offer was challenging.
Or maybe you won't.
I called Armando to check in. He sounded distracted. At one point, early in the conver-
sation, I began to doubt that he even knew who I was.
“You know—the blond guy from Washington? With the tall guy?”
“Yes, Patrick,” he assured me. “I know who you are. You want to buy the house my
brother lives in. Of course.”
Wherever his mind had been, it clicked back into super-smooth mode now.
“What can I do for you?”
“Do we have an asking price yet?”
I could hear him shuffling papers on his desk. I couldn't help wondering if this was
a ruse, something I'd seen people do in movies to make people they're talking to on the
phone think they're searching for relevant documents when they're actually just scratching
their privates or looking out the window.
“Yes,” he said after a few moments, then quoted $300,000.
This was a sock in the gut.
“I thought Melinda said it was within our price range.”
“Hmm,” he said. “I wouldn't know about that. What is your price range?”
“Our ceiling is $230,000,” I replied, reducing our do-or-die price by $20,000 to give us
a bit of wiggle room for negotiations.
“Your what?”
With a tiny thrill of satisfaction I realized I'd finally pushed past the limits of Ar-
mando's remarkably good English. It made me feel less moronic about not being able to
string together more than five words of Spanish with any degree of proficiency.
“Our price ceiling.”
Dead silence.
“Our top price.”
I waited. He digested.
“That's your tallest ceiling?”
“Absolute tallest,” I said, stifling a guffaw.
“Hang on,” he said.